Special trains to ease rush on Kalka-Shimla route

, May 14: Two special trains will run on the Kalka-Shimla railway, declared the World Heritage, from Thursday to meet the tourist rush, an official said on Wednesday.

Currently, six trains are running to and fro between Kalka in Haryana and Shimla in Himachal Pradesh.

One special train will depart the Kalka station at 6.30 a.m. and another at 12.45 p.m. Each toy train, as it is popularly known, has seven coaches and can accommodate nearly 200 passengers, a railway official told IANS.

Over a century-old, the 96-km-long narrow gauge rail line was built to ferry Europeans between Kalka and Shimla, the then summer capital of British India.

In 2009, the Kalka-Shimla railway was declared a World Heritage site by the Unesco.

It takes around five hours to complete a one-way journey between the two terminals. There are 102 tunnels on the rail line.

IANS